20th century
The 20th century of the Christian Era began on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000. According to the Gregorian calendar, 2000 was the first century leap year since 1600. The century saw a major shift in the way that vast numbers of people lived, as a result of political, ideological, economic, social, cultural, scientific, technological, and medical change and progress. Terms like ideology, world war, genocide, and nuclear war entered common usage. Scientific discoveries, such as the theory of relativity and quantum physics, drastically changed the worldview of scientists, causing them to realize that the universe was fantastically more complex than previously believed, and dashing the hopes at the end of the 19th century that the last few details of scientific knowledge were about to be filled in. Accelerating scientific understanding, more efficient communications, and faster transportation transformed the world in those hundred years more rapidly and widely than at any time in the past. It was a century that started with horses, simple automobiles, and freighters but ended with luxury sedans, cruise ships, airliners and the space shuttle. Horses, Western society's basic form of personal transportation for thousands of years, was replaced by automobiles and buses within the span of a few decades. These developments were made possible by the large-scale exploitation of fossil fuel resources (especially petroleum), which offered large amounts of energy in an easily portable form, but also caused widespread concerns about pollution and long-term impact on the environment. Humanity explored outer space for the first time, even taking their first footsteps on the Moon. The nature of change Due to continuing industrialization and expanding trade, many significant changes of the 20th century were, directly or indirectly, economic and technological in nature. Inventions such as the light bulb, the automobile, and the telephone in the late 1800s, followed by supertankers, airliners, motorways, radio, television, antibiotics, frozen food, computers and microcomputers, the Internet, and mobile telephones affected the quality of life for great numbers. Scientific research and technological development was the force behind vast changes in everyday life, to a degree which was unprecedented in human history. Events 1900 - 1909 * 1901: wikipedia:Queen Victoria dies at age 82, which marks the end of the Victoria Age. * 1905: The First Electric Toaster. * 1905: A Radio Transmitter goes live, meaning the First Radio. * 1906: The wikipedia:Electric Washing Machine is invented. * 1906: Britain launches the battleship HMS Dreadnought, the fastest and heaviest armored warship yet ever built. * 1907: Norwegian women gain the vote. * 1908: Vacuum Cleaner is Invented. 1910's (10's) * First Internal combustion engine tractors built. * 1914 First world War starts after Germany invades France (Note: Help Edit the decads, if you can, add in links to significant events featured on other pages) 1920's (20's) 1930's (30's) * Harry Ferguson creates the Ferguson Model A and buildes it with David Brown * David Browncreates his own tractor the David Brown VAK1 after Ferguson does a deal with Henry Ford * Frank Perkins foundes the Perkins Engines Company * 1939 The 2nd world war is declared after Germany invades Poland, Austria and France 1940's (40's) * 1945 2nd world war ends 1950's (50's) 1960's (60's) * Ford of Britain opens new Basildon factory for tractor production in UK and lanches the Ford 1000 series * The last steam rollers built in Brittain. (by ?) 1970's (70's) 1980's (80's) 1990's (90's) * Ford sell tractor operation to Fiat to create CNH Global Developments in brief : Also see (for more details of general history): wikipedia:20th century events. See also * wikipedia:20th century events * 20th century inventions * The individual decades and years References Based on an extract from the Wikipedia:20th Century article Sources * External links * The 20th Century Research Project * Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century * TIME Archives The greatest writers of the 20th Century * Letters from the 1900s century Decades Years |list = }} Category:20th century Category:2nd millennium Category:Centuries